is it possible to read my mail archives with php?

datamining content

[Oliver Henniges]

I'm afraid this is more a question on outlook express rather than php, but php is the only programming language I have considerable experience with, and I found no ww-forum on mails specifically.

I was thinking about compiling an FAQ from my collected answers filed as mails in my sent-mails-folder. Of course I might do it with copy & paste, but I'm wondering whether there is a chance to swallow the original files in a database as a first step, so that I might perfom some initial preselections according to the recepients or topics.

Does anyone know what outlook express exactly does while writing its .dbx-files to the hard-drive? Is there only a compression-algorithm at work (and if yes, which) or is there something more to this for security reasons? Is it possible to extract the mails from these files, or can you think of any interface by means of which I might extract the header-data and content of my mails using php on my local wamp-installation?

[phparion]

dbx php manual [php.net]

and yes it is possible to read your emails from outlook using PHP. You can write your own POP3 email rendering class or use any open source one.

[Little_G]

Hi,

You could read the dbx file with php, though it may not be that easy.
google "outlook express dbx file format" [google.com].

Andrew

[Oliver Henniges]

Thx, guys, this forum is a great resource, as always.

[Oliver Henniges]

I tried to get access to the dbx-files using dbx_connect, but it didn't work yet. I used:

$link = dbx_connect (DBX_MSSQL, "", $thisdb, "myusername", "mypassword", DBX_PERSISTENT);

with $thisdb containing the path to the dbx-file, but this seems somewhat naive, I'm afraid.

What type of dbx is it? mssql? odbc?
What, precisely, is the name of the "server"?

I also found a php-script-snippet named ms_dbx_reader.class.inc.php
It opens the *.dbx-file with fopen and walks through the information stored there. However, the script is a bit buggy or not compatible with php5.0. I might use it as a vehicle to improve my understanding of those dbx-files, but I actually did not want to dive that deep into the syntax. Yes, indeed, it is not easy.